“In other words, just as Ascendance of a Bookworm shows a character changing the world through the pursuit of a certain invention, and How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom saves a nation through accountancy (no, really), Tearmoon Empire’s protagonist sets out to change her world by not being such a terrible bitch.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Nozomu Mochitsuki’s Tearmoon Empire.

‘He found an unlikely celebrity supporter in the form of the author Yukio Mishima. “The pay-library comics that once could only be purchased in the flea markets of Ueno had ten times more vulgarity, cruelty, wild abandon and vitality than today,” Mishima wrote. “But in Hiroshi Hirata’s samurai comics, with their direct, serious art style, I find a nostalgia for kamishibai of old, and a sensibility in the manner of the violent warrior prints of the late Edo period.”‘

Over at All the Anime I write the obituary for the manga creator Hiroshi Hirata.

“Man-made ecological disaster is not a single event, but an ongoing cycle of ever-greater deprivation and compromise, Conan’s generation simply have to live with it, prefiguring the controversial storyline of a much later anime, Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Alexander Key’s The Incredible Tide.

“Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted some of its animation work to a studio in Japan, only to send back the materials on the grounds that the Japanese work was not of high enough quality. That was definitely a bad day at the office for someone, but was it trolling for the hell of it, or a sign of a true sea-change in quality control and expectations?”

Over at All the Anime, I review a great book about Japanese animation and its place in the world.

“Yasugi’s death, apparently by his own hand, in December 2021, might also be attributed to the COVID pandemic, in that he had earlier confessed to relatives that much of his work had dried up as a result of it.”

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, my entry on Masayoshi Yasugi also turns out to be his obituary.

‘Taking the pen-name Alice from one of her mother’s songs, she wrote the lyrics to Matsuda’s “Love is Always 95 Points,” a fact not revealed until sometime later. Her lyrics deftly capture the doubts of a girl for whom romance is itself a performance – a tense preparation before the mirror, an agonising choice on costume, and an entrance into public space, ever fretful that her date is going to laugh at her.’

Over at All the Anime, I write an obituary for Sayaka Kanda, the actress, singer and lyricist who fell to her death at a Hokkaido hotel yesterday.

“Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion is a delightful collection of fresh scholarship on all sorts of intriguing aspects of anime, as revealed through various angles to a famous and much-loved series, itself given a new lease of life and a new legion of fans thanks to Netflix. Published by Stockholm University Press, but organised out of the University of Vigo in Spain, it is a well-curated volume that will provide much food for thought for anime scholars and the more chin-strokey of fans.”

Over at All the Anime I review the second open-access anime publication from Stockholm University Press.

They say that Keiko Nobumoto was underrated in her lifetime, but the Anime Encyclopedia has credited her with writing “many of the better anime scripts of recent years” for the last decade.

Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the lead writer on Cowboy Bebop.

“So, if you’ve ever wondered why nobody goes to the toilet in sword-and-sorcery movies, why all alien queens fall simpering at the feet of dorks from Earth, or why no-one ever asks the Narnia kids how many pairs of pants they’ve packed, El Hazard is for you.”

Over at All the Anime, I’m singing the praises of the anime El Hazard, with an article that I originally wrote so long ago that it is one of the oldest legacy Word documents on my hard-drive, originally for either Anime UK or Anime FX way, way back when.